CoSign: Lava La Rue’s Sci-Fi Wonderland

The post CoSign: Lava La Rue’s Sci-Fi Wonderland appeared first on Consequence .

Every month, Consequence puts the spotlight on an artist who’s poised for the big time with CoSign . For July 2024, that accolade goes to London artist Lava La Rue and their cosmic debut, STARFACE.

Science fiction is beloved for many reasons, but a primary one is the possibilities of bending reality. Ever lament the rigid binaries of human society? There’s a world waiting to be invented, free from those shackles.

The London artist Lava La Rue has no problem world building, and their stunning sci-fi debut STARFACE is a cosmic odyssey that leans into those grey areas — in gender, genre, and species. “When it comes to sci-fi, you can say anything about an alien and people won’t question it,” Lava tells Consequence over a video call. They’re referring to Starface, a gender-fluid alien who has crash landed on Earth and the protagonist of the album’s journey.

“You could be like, ‘Yes, this alien has no gender’ and nobody could be like, ‘Well no, no, of course it must have a gender because…’ Dude, this is an alien! So when it comes to sci-fi, people just accept the reality that you give them.”

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With a rich mixture of funk, psychedelic rock, R&B, and dream pop, STARFACE spans from earthbound to stratospheric, asking big questions about humanity in the process. Like the album’s titular alien, Lava La Rue refuses to be pinned down or relegated to a certain style, instead tinting each song with the same psychedelic peach-purple hue. Even describing the album’s sound is a hodge podge of ideas — “Funkadelic Britpop” is how Lava hears it.

But beneath all the dazzling sonic layers, STARFACE is a concept album that lies only a few steps away from a sci-fi romance film.  splits the difference between the David Bowie-starring film The Man Who Fell to Earth and what Lava refers to as “Lesbian Ziggy Stardust. ” The project follows the titular alien Starface who crash lands in the UK, and discovers their true mission: To save humanity and stop us from being so self-destructive. According to Lava, however, Starface “ends up becoming a bit self-destructive themself.”

Meanwhile, a love triangle blossoms between Starface, a girl, and that girl’s boyfriend (delightfully touched upon in “LOVEBITES”), Lava takes aim at corporate greed and the “work-til-you-drop” attitude to illustrate why humanity is suffering (the one-two punch of “CHANGE” and “HUMANITY”), and 17 songs later, we end with a cliff hanger, with Lava crooning as Starface, “I crashed landed the day we first met/ And saw the world’s fate changing/ Do I stay here?/ Or save you?”

It’s undoubtedly a tall order for Lava La Rue, but they’ve spent the last six years setting bigger and bigger expectations for themselves. The 26 year-old grew up in London to immigrant parents and eventually entered foster care. Before meeting their future collaborators at Richmond upon Thames College, they were surrounded by punk and DIY communities, learning how to create work from the ground up and establish their own artistic identity in the process. Though they’ve put out several works before STARFACE , it technically serves as their first full-length album.

“ STARFACE is a bit like wiping a clean slate,” they say, “Sometimes I talk to my friends who tried out loads of projects throughout their teens and then when they hit their mid-20s, they’re able to start a new project and be like, ‘this is me’ and set their career off like that… But I’ve just been doing all of it under the same name. So STARFACE is a debut because this is the first time I’ve sat down and spent my years of my life to make a record. Everything before this was a young person just figuring it out.”

Lava identifies lead single “Push N Shuv” as the moment where STARFACE revealed itself. “I made that song years ago, in late 2019… and if you listen to the stuff I was making in 2019, ‘Push N Shuv’ was miles away from that,” Lava says, referring to the song’s live instrumental feel and hi-fi funk. Though they were itching to put it out on their subsequent EPs Butter Fly and Hi-Fidelity , they opted to wait until they were signed to a record label and could tour with a live band — a compromise that thoroughly matches Lava La Rue’s big-budget ambitions. “Sometimes you have really good ideas and you do need to wait for the right alignment in order for them to soar as far,” they say.

In between making “Push N Shuv” and working on STARFACE , Lava did eventually achieve some of these lofty goals. They signed to British label Dirty Hit in late 2022 and now count The 1975, beabadoobee, and The Japanese House as label-mates. They’ve got that live band, and are set to open for Remi Wolf this fall in their first formal tour of the US (get tickets here ). And most importantly, they took the time to conceptualize STARFACE , making it the debut album they always dreamed of.

With sci-fi being a core inspiration — plus Lava La Rue’s frequent dabbling in filmmaking and visual art — STARFACE was crafted as if it was a screenplay, with the accompanying visuals in mind. “‘STARFACE’s Descent,’ for example, I already knew the visual was going to be an animation of me crash landing, and we made the song to accompany that — almost like we were soundtracking, but without the visual existing yet,” says Lava.

To make things even more cinematic, Lava enlisted some of their closest collaborators whose origins span continents. There are standout guest spots from California psych-pop artist Cuco, South Korean Singer So!YoON!, New Jersey rapper Audrey Nuna, Malaysian-Irish singer and producer Yunè Pinku, and several more. Lava uses these guests to help propel the narrative of the record, but also to serve as important musical touchstones on an otherwise sprawling sonic journey.

“Every feature on STARFACE is kind of like a cameo or a special guest star in an episode, like if you’re watching Star Trek and it’s like, ‘Oh, this person is on here, this person is here for this scene,'” they say. Both the narrative and the guest stars reach a pinnacle halfway through the album on “FLUORESCENT/Beyond Space,” which features the London rapper Feux as well as Lava’s star-studded collective, NiNE8.

The track itself is a saga, and it’s particularly endearing to hear Lava surrounded by the London collaborators they got their start alongside, like Biig Piig and Lorenzo RSV. “I wanted it to feel like a point in the album where we’re all assembling to fight the big boss,” Lava says, conjuring the “Avengers Assemble” image but with their NiNE8 teammates as sci-fi superheroes. According to Lava, “FLUORESCENT/Beyond Space” was the hardest to finish. “It’s like three songs in one song. There are seven features in total, including myself,” they reflected. Fittingly, Lava wrote and demoed the track solo, but then realized that there needed to be some other voices in the mix. “Sometimes, making a good song is knowing when to remove yourself and take up less space,” they say.

If anything is clear during our conversation, it’s that Lava La Rue has no problem picking up a new trade. They can be the star, the director, the writer, the art curator, the hired gun, and everything in between, all at once. It’s a major asset for them, of course, but it’s also something demanded of their generation when it comes to creative professions. The days of fulfilling one role and doing it well are long gone; now, it’s expected that artists do it all at top speed.

Despite the volume of expectations, Lava is unfazed. “This might not work for everyone, but wearing many hats helps me not burn out,” they say. “I think I burn out when I’m doing just one thing and then I hit a wall with it. Whereas having different avenues helps me sort of take a break from one thing and then go and be creative somewhere else, and then it means I can return back to that one thing with like a new perspective. It means the moment I get writer’s block, I go out there, I put on an event or I make some clothes or I make a music video for someone and instantly I come back to the studio so inspired with so much more to say.”

Lava La Rue’s multi-disciplinary approach is all over STARFACE — it’s high stakes, high concept, and high execution. STARFACE is a lot, but so is being human. Hence, the album’s science fiction core. “Sci-fi has always been used as a microcosm of what’s actually happening in the real world,” Lava says. “People go to the cinema to watch it and come out thinking ‘These are the good guys, these are the bad guys…’, and it’s literally mirroring our society. Like with Dune or with The Hunger Games … everything is so clear about what’s right and what’s wrong. But then when it comes to real life, people are like, ‘Actually, it’s a little bit more complicated than that…'”

They’ve got a point — for all its epic qualities, Lava La Rue keeps STARFACE a simple story about humanity and taking care of each other. It’s a sci-fi wonderland of their making, but ridden within STARFACE are traces of the everyday, the London streets they grew up on, the lovely band of people they came up with. It may sound like a different universe, but it’s Lava’s world, and we’re just living in it.

CoSign: Lava La Rue’s Sci-Fi Wonderland
Paolo Ragusa